Fernando Trueba and his 'Opera Prima' at Ópera.
On October 17, 1919, Madrid joined 12 other cities in the world in modernizing urban transport. King Alfonso XIII inaugurated with great fanfare the first Metro section: Line 1 between Sol and Cuatro Caminos. A century later, this route is still one of the most frequented, but the extension of the network is approaching at 300 kilometers, with 301 stops, behind only Paris, Seoul, Shanghai and New York.
657.2 million people took the Metro in 2018. An increase of 4.6% compared to the previous year. Many things happen on those platforms and on those trains. Many people pass. It is normal that the cinema has used it as a regular setting in these 100 years. We got on the train to go making stops very cinephiles. Next stop…
A Million in the Trash (1967)
**Romantic stop: 'The swing' (1993) **
at the station University City. At dawn, we intuit, because there is no one. Just a boy and a girl. Both on the same platform. They look at each other, but do not speak. Well, they speak to each other in silence, with their eyes. The subway as a place of crushes in the pre-Tinder era. The subway when it was still smoking on its platforms in the short of Álvaro Fernández Armero with Coque Malla and Ariadna Gil.
Another unfortunate couple was also a scene from the beginning, the one that formed Unax Ugalde and Pilar López de Ayala in Dance me the water (2000).
I will always wait for you, my love!
**Nostalgic stop: 'Carousel c. 1950' (2004) **
We talk about Jose Luis Garcia always returning from the present to another past, better, according to him. Here, Elsa Pataky She was a ticket clerk for Metro, a job that was opened up to women almost from the beginning, although with a lot of controversy because they were forbidden to marry: if they wanted to work, they just worked, they didn't consider that they could also attend to their obligations as housewives.
Long before Pataky was already working as a box office attendant in this cinephile Metro, **Gracita Morales in A Vampire for Two** (Pedro Lazaga, 1965) . And her husband, Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez he was also an employee: gorilla.
**War stop: 'Bicycles are for summer' (1964) **
The memory that the Madrid Metro had a key function during the Civil War: the underground was filled with people protecting themselves from the bombs of the fascist side. It never closed during the three years of struggle, It was a refuge for many people and some stations also had a more active role for the Republican troops.
Only the deluded take the Metro.
**Ghost and worker parade: 'Barrio' (1998) **
Another proud Madrilenian, Fernando Leon de Aranoa He has used the Madrid Metro regularly in his films. In princesses (2005) and, above all, here, in Barrio, where Manu's father had been a train driver and thus they knew the legend of the ghost station that changed places. Looking for her, one night, they find that of Chamberí, closed and today a museum, that León de Aranoa turns into a refuge for exiles and social expatriates.
The Metro as working-class transportation was already a movie buff scene in the 50s, as in my uncle hyacinth (1956), on the way to Sales, well dressed in lights.
Go well dressed in the Metro.
**Stop interruptus: 'November' (2003) **
It had to be the Madrid Metro, but Achero Manas they didn't let him put his anti-system artists on the capital's suburban trains. He had to shoot those scenes in Bilbao. “But everything went very well. As the action took place inside a wagon, it slipped in as if it was Madrid, ”he confessed at the time. A very Madrid-born director, three years earlier with his applauded debut feature, El Bola, he did pull off another very popular station: Urgel.
**Nightmare Stop: 'The Long Night of the White Canes' (1979) **
The nightmare in which the Goya station, its platforms, corridors, for José María Rodero and Quique San Francisco.
**Cañí stop: 'Opera debut' (1980) **
Madrid as a stage. The opera subway as a meeting place in the debut of Fernando Trueba. More than 30 years later, another Trueba, the son, Jonas, he also chooses Madrid as the setting for his cinema. And the Antón Martín Metro as a backdrop in The delusional.
Reunions in the Subway.
**Beauty stop: 'Labyrinth of passions' (1982) **
Cecilia Roth she got on the subway in Aluche and put on makeup in the car in the movie Almodovar. That activity that sometimes causes some controversy. Who was she bothering? To nobody.
**Stop the crime: 'La estanquera de Vallecas' (1987) **
They arrived at Puente de Vallecas and Vallecas Bridge the two robbers left Emma Penella, the tobacconist of Vallecas in the first film of eloy of the church with a very young Maribel Verdu.
**Suspicious stop: 'May God forgive us' (2016) **
The misogynist and gerontophile murderer in the film by Rodrigo Sorogoyen ran away from Antonio de la Torre and Roberto Alamo for the crowded opera Station, where both cops messed it up a bit on one day with an extra crowd.
The subway upside down.